Business Process Reengineering Example: Hyfas Pits OutSystems vs SAP

Rui Afonso, OutSystems Channel Manager at Hyfas, presented the pitfalls they faced at Refrige when re-engineering their business processes.

Refrige had a very complex material creation process that spanned across 7 distinct departments. Communication was made by email and Infopath, and at the end of the process the IT department would copy the gathered information into SAP and BASIS. The IT department had to confirm all the data, and sometimes this resulted in requesting missing inputs from information owners.

Hyfas considered both SAP and OutSystems technologies to implement their solution. They picked OutSystems because it was faster (twice as fast as working with SAP, according to Rui), provided a reusable framework for future projects, and because everyone was talking about OutSystems and how well their applications worked.

Rui talked a bit about how the project went and mentioned that even though the process was still under construction, using OutSystems made this a non-issue. He also pointed out that the main trouble with the project resided in the integrations with SAP, and gave the audience some very good advice for such integrations. The advice included making sure that you have an SAP expert available, checking all the SAP processes and BAPIs both inside and outside the SAP environment, and being very careful with custom SAP developments.

For wrap-up Rui showed some screenshots of the application and explained how they extended the information available in SAP to overcome some shortcomings of the old system. He also share his experiences on using the OutSystems platform, and gave some highlights on how it improved the final product:

End users had their requests met in hours

Bug fixing was much more effective

A number of issues were fixed before some users noticed the issue was there!

Central change management, without having to call or email the development team

Rui then gave the mic to Sérgio Almeida, Project Manager at Refrige, for his customer testimonial. Sérgio emphasized once more that SAP expertise is paramount. He also mentioned that he was very pleased with Hyfas commitment in, not only delivering a solution, but a solution that works really well for the customer. Sérgio ended up stating that the project went really well and shared some of his experiences with an Agile project. He finished up by staying “if it’s up to me, I’ll continue to do projects in OutSystems.”

Rodrigo Coutinho

A member of the founder’s team, Rodrigo has a passion for web development, great products, and geeky stuff. He spends his time designing future versions of the OutSystems Platform and dreaming about the cool future of the web.

Explore other categories:

More posts in this category:

We did something great at ATC. Something innovative. Something, almost unheard of. We took the bull by the horns, and we beat it to the ground. We fought our way through hell... and back. And we did it, I must add, impressively well. We created Sapphire, possibly the world's first, dare I say, and only, cloud-ready hospital management system.

About a year ago, OutSystems CEO Paulo Rosado said we were witnessing a turning point in the market, where demands for digital transformation were at the epicenter. A year later, the digital Darwinism is settled. But in this case, the survivors are not the strongest, but the best adaptable to change.

Here at OutSystems, we often get asked about how low-code rapid application development platforms can scale. While we know low-code scales well because we have hundreds of customers running applications that are serving millions of users on our platform, we decided to set out and demonstrate just how scalable low-code can be. So, we set up a benchmark to test our low-code platform under varying levels of load from simulated users.